THOMAS WAYNE MARKLE, THE VILLAIN FROM THE FAIRY TALE
Meghan Markle's father could be 'royal', but he became a cartoon character who preferred to sell photos, videos and information about his daughter. He now he is at the center of the Sussexes' legal battle against the Mail on Sunday tabloid.
"They owe it to me." They were the desperate words of Thomas Markle, now a Disney villain, when the separation of Harry and Meghan Markle from the ephemeral royal fantasy they have lived became effective. By then, denounced by his daughter, The duchess's father already accumulated a history in which he went from faking a robbery preparing Meghan's wedding to selling and publishing the letter that his daughter wrote him in despair asking him to stop trading with his life.
In less than two years, Thomas Markle ceased to be a man of flesh and blood to join a pantheon of cartoons. A name that could appear alongside that of characters like Drizella or Anastasia Tremaine, the stepsisters from the Cinderella tale: an operetta villain, driven by resentment and greed, with recurring plans with which the only thing he has managed to do is hurt his daughter and son-in-law.
It is he who embodies that outbreak that Harry had better than anyone, when the pressure on the Dukes of Sussex became intolerable: “I have seen what happens when a person I love becomes a commodity to the point that they no longer she is seen or treated like a real person ”, he said in clear reference to his mother, Lady Di.
The news it generates also reveals the tragicomic part of the Disney princess villains: the outfit she had for her daughter's wedding, that last great royal wedding where Hollywood and Buckingham lived together in perfect harmony and where Thomas Markle did not take his daughter. to the altar, ended that same summer at Ascot. He was bought off by a sports betting mogul to boast that his clothes were one day almost royal. And for 2,000 pounds, just under 2,400 euros.
Meanwhile, the Mail on Sunday and the rest of the tabloids and publications related to the bait have squeezed the character as far as possible. Piers Morgan, one of the least scrupulous men in the UK, wasted no time inviting him to her morning show, with a staged speech in which Thomas demanded of Queen Elizabeth II the attention Meghan had denied him for years. The American was everything that institutions like Morgan or the Mail could wish for, and that is none other than the point where the two stories on which they feed intersect: the royals and the grotesque lives.
It was like this from the beginning of the relationship, in the same 2016 in which the tabloids smelled the blood of a courtship between a wayward prince and a divorced actress, Thomas Markle filed for bankruptcy, with debts of more than $ 30,000 - he he has come to say, crying, that he owed less, or three times that amount, or whatever it was depending on the day and the need to appear in a headline. It is an end that he has reached by his own decisions and despite having had a professional career as a television technician. He, too, had a stroke of fortune in 1990, shortly after divorcing Doria Ragland, when he won $ 750,000 in the California lottery - money equivalent to 1.5 million euros today.
Today, cornered in a forced retreat in a small town in Mexico, advised only by his daughter Samantha Markle - a dyed step-sister who has also done everything possible to splash Meghan and Harry with the misfortunes of the last name - Thomas has clung to a nail burning: the one to traffic with better days of the Markle that went ahead. And, as in the stories, his actions accelerated the Megxit.
Every time Thomas sold a new package of photos of Meghan's childhood, made up conversations, or portrayed himself as a wounded man to whom the Crown owed imaginary redress, he drove another wedge between the Dukes of Sussex and the country whose press dealt with them. well and from which they are gone. The latest move by Thomas - who will testify against his daughter in the lawsuit that she filed against the Mail on Sunday for violating her privacy - has been to sell a video of Meghan when she was 16 years old in a theater function at the same time as He accused her of having devalued the English Crown and jettisoning "every girl's dream of being a princess."
And she has, according to Thomas Markle, for money. And the same motive, he says, is the one that has pushed the Sussexes to abandon royal life. For money, says someone who puts silver coins above blood.
